Write for Your Life

LAWRENCE BLOCK

WRITE FOR YOUR LIFE

CONTENTS

READ THIS FIRST OR WE’LL SHOOT THE DOG…

I SUPPOSE YOU’RE WONDERING WHY I SUMMONED YOU ALL HERE

LIKE A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

OPENING UP TO MEDITATION

FEAR IS NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF

I’M WRITING AS FAST AS I CAN

EXPERIENCE, PAST AND FUTURE

YOUR MOST UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTERS

WANNA BUY A CRYSTAL BALL?

LOOKING AT THE WRITER IN THE MIRROR

AS A WRITER THINKETH

THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING

THE BIRTH OF A WRITER

THE LITTLE WRITER THAT COULD

THE MOST PROFITABLE WRITING YOU CAN DO

THIRTY DAYS TO A MORE POWERFUL SELF-IMAGE

OPENING UP

A FEW QUICK THOUGHTS ABOUT TIME

SETTING YOUR SIGHTS AND APPLAUDING YOUR SUCCESSES

THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING

Afterword

About the Author

Also by Lawrence Block

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

READ THIS FIRST OR WE’LL SHOOT THE DOG…

Funny thing. I write a fair number of introductions to anthologies and collections, and I often begin by urging the reader to skip my prefatory remarks. The material needs no introduction, I say, so why are you wasting your time with this? I have no choice, I’m getting paid for this, but you can skip to the good part.

Don’t you dare skip this!

I wrote Write For Your Life in the summer of 1985, shortly after my wife and I moved from New York City to Fort Myers Beach, Florida. For a couple of years Lynne and I had been dashing around the country to present a seminar for writers, one which addressed the inner game of writing. We could have called it that—The Inner Game of Writing—or we could have called it Developing the Writer Within, but what we called it was Write For Your Life.

(And what a stroke of genius that turned out to be. Several times we called hotels to book space for the seminars, only to be turned down by folks who thought we were saying Right For Your Life, and that we had something to do with the abortion controversy.)

The seminar was remarkably effective, but its audience was going to be limited. I wanted to make its content available to people who would never be able to attend it. So I took two weeks off and put it in book form, thinking that the volume would serve three purposes: it would help potential attendees to decide whether to take the seminar, while giving those who did attend something to take home with them and at the same time constituting a home seminar for everybody else.

I never even considered taking Write For Your Life to a commercial publisher. I knew I wanted to self-publish it, for two compelling reasons. First, I didn’t want to wait a year or more for finished books—I wanted them in a hurry. Secondly, I’d always had fantasies of self-publication—I think most writers do, at one time or another—and figured this book was the perfect candidate. Its potential audience was one I could most effectively reach through our seminar advertising.

The experience was a happy one. I had books in hand by the end of the year, and essentially sold out our 5,000–copy first printing over the next couple of years. I priced the book too low—the cover price was $10, and it should have been at least $15 and probably $20, given the economics of the mail-order business—and I don’t know that we made money on it, since it’s hard to know how to calculate the advertising costs. But I had fun, and that was the point. (It generally is.)

Within two years, Lynne and I were out of the seminar business. I know there’s a way to make a profit doing seminars, but I swear we couldn’t find it. By the time we finished paying for plane tickets and hotel space and advertising, we were lucky to break even—and the amount of time and energy expended was incalculable. That was okay as long as we were enjoying ourselves, but the time came when the experience of leading the seminars began to feel like performance, and I have always had a low threshold for boredom. (I have a hunch it’s essential equipment for a writer.) Since we were knocking ourselves out and losing money, the decision to stop was not terribly hard to reach. Shortly thereafter we put the Fort Myers house on the market and spent two years and change driving around the country. Then we came back to New York, and we’ve been here ever since.

The seminar’s over and done with, the book’s out of print—but Write For Your Life has somehow refused to die. People who took the seminar keep turning up to tell me what a powerful and lasting effect it had on them. All sorts of people want the book—and I haven’t had books to sell them. My stock of 5,000 copies has long since dwindled to a single box of two dozen, and, while I sell lots of books through my newsletter and on my website, I’ve been reluctant to put these on the market; the book commands a very high price as a collector’s item, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable charging that kind of premium to someone who wants the book for its content, not its collector value.

The obvious answer would be to reprint the book, but I haven’t been in a rush to do that, either, because it’s out of date in certain significant ways. It talks about the seminar itself as an ongoing entity, and it’s not; I’ve been there and done that, and the last thing I intend to do is return to the seminar dodge. It would take substantial rewriting to update the book in that respect.

Then too, the tone of the book is more Gee Whiz than I’m comfortable with sixteen years later. It would take a lot of work to tone that down, and it might very well be to the book’s detriment.

For at least five years now I’ve been promising to get the book back in print, and I don’t seem to find the time and/or inclination to fix it. So I’ve decided the hell with it. It strikes me as more important to get it back in print than to make it perfect, and toward that end I’ve done some light editing, and have written this introduction and urged you to read it in order to put the whole book in perspective. The book’s insights still strike me as valid, and the exercises are still useful, and the whole thing still works.

I’ve made a few changes. My friend Bob Mandel wrote an introduction, which I’ve dropped, and I myself wrote a final chapter of acknowledgments, in which I said very nice things about a number of people. I’ve dropped that, too; I wish them all well, but the material seemed irrelevant.

Write For Your Life owed a lot to various seminars we ourselves took in what used to be called the Human Potential Movement. I’ve edited out specific references to these teachers and seminars insofar as possible, as I’ve lost touch with them, don’t know what’s still available, and don’t know that I’d be inclined to recommend any of them in their present form.

If you want the original bound book, check my website, www.lawrenceblock.com. If I decide to put my remaining copies on the market, that’s where you’ll find them. Similarly, if our storage locker yields up copies of the Affirmations for Writers tape, or if I have it re mastered and decide to market it again, I’ll let the world know via the website.

There. Aren’t you glad you took the time to read this? And now we don’t have to shoot the dog.

I SUPPOSE YOU’RE WONDERING WHY I SUMMONED YOU ALL HERE

Hi. I’m Larry Block, and I’d like to welcome you to Write For Your Life.

I’ve chosen that last sentence to begin this book because I can’t think of a better way to convey what the next 60,000 words are all about. The volume you are holding represents an attempt to take an intensive day-long seminar for writers and put it on paper. Since Write For Your Life is an experiential seminar, deriving much of its power from the shared energy and kinetic interaction of its participants, my aim has been to recreate that experience in book form, and it seems logical to begin by standing up in front of you, as it were, introducing myself, and inviting you to share the experience rendered herein.

But that, I’m afraid, is hindsight. I chose that opening sentence because I’m used to it. I’ve stood up in front of groups of people over thirty times in the past two years to introduce myself and my seminar. I have been told repeatedly that I seem remarkably calm and laid-back in front of the room. I do not always feel all that calm.

The first Write For Your Life was in Indianapolis in November of 1983. There were about sixty people in the room, and none of them had the slightest idea what they were getting into. I had been struck by the idea for the seminar in July, had outlined and developed my material, and had scheduled a seminar in New York City for mid-November. I had previously been booked to teach fiction writing at the Central Indiana Writer’s Conference in Indianapolis, with a two-and-a-half-hour presentation on Saturday and Sunday. It occurred to me that this would be a great opportunity to give my seminar an out-of-town tryout. If it worked before an Indiana audience who had been in no way prepared for what I was going to do, it would certainly work for a group of New Yorkers who had read our promotional material and specifically chosen to pay a hundred dollars each for what we were offering. And, if it dropped dead in Indianapolis, who’d know? I could just make a point of flying over the state in the future, or driving around it.

Because, you see, I had no real way of knowing that Write For Your Life would work. I knew the way writers were accustomed to being taught. They were used to lectures (A short story has a beginning, a middle and an ending. "I think what all of us editors, and certainly those of us at Modern Reptile & Amphibian, are looking for is a story that breaks all our own rules and wins us over anyway. And then John O’Hara said to me, ‘Willie’—he always used to call me Willie—). They were used to reading their work out loud and having it analyzed and criticized by their fellows. They were not ready for some clown from New York announcing that they would start off with a group meditation to center the energy in the room." Nor were they prepared for the various interactional processes that would comprise the seminar.

That first morning in Indianapolis I felt like one of those divers in Acapulco, those kids who leap off the cliffs before the wave comes in, calculating that it’ll get there the same time they do. If they’re wrong about that, they’ll hit the rocks instead of the water.

Come to think of it, I always feel like one of those Mexican kids. That first day, I felt like the first one who ever did it. It looked good on paper, and it was the sort of thing that ought to work, but how did I know the wave would come in when it was supposed to?

The wave came in right on schedule in Indianapolis. Looking back on that weekend, realizing that I presented new material to an unprepared audience with no trained assistants on hand, I can only marvel that it worked as well as it did. I was sustained throughout by the excitement of the whole thing, and by the time I boarded my flight back to New York Sunday evening I had scheduled a regular seminar in Indianapolis for the following June and found someone to be our local organizer for the area. I think I could have flown home that night without the plane. I was exhausted from the energy I’d put out over the weekend, but at the same time I was greatly energized and uplifted by the experience. I had never had that particular feeling before, and I knew I wanted more of it.

Seminar season is a crazy time. Typically, a weekend goes something like this: Friday morning, Lynne and I get up early, pack more bags than we can comfortably carry, remember on our way out the door that we’ve forgotten the cassette player, and race to the airport in time to fly to the seminar location. We spend what’s left of Friday making last-minute on-site arrangements-checking the room, handling details with the hotel’s catering manager and our own local organizer, making sure we have enough assistants lined up, writing out name tags and getting a floral centerpiece delivered. Saturday, from ten to seven, we present the seminar. Saturday night we collapse, and Sunday morning we pack up and fly home again.

Then we spend the week scheduling advertising and booking hotel space and processing book and tape orders and answering phone calls and paying bills and checking receipts and handling enrollments, and then it’s Friday morning and we’re off again. We get to travel a lot, but we rarely see much besides airports and hotels. We get to meet a lot of people, but we rarely have the time to get to know them.

This is not a complaint. It is preamble to a story.

The story is told of Sinclair Lewis, who at the height of his fame was engaged to present a series of lectures on writing to students at Harvard University. Lewis at the time was the ultimate literary lion, a huge popular success and a critical favorite as well. He had turned down a Pulitzer Prize and accepted a Nobel Prize, he had hit the best seller list repeatedly, and he had acquired a personal reputation for outrageous behavior that very nearly eclipsed his work. Not surprisingly, his lectures were immediately oversubscribed and the authorities chose to hold them in a main auditorium.

At the appointed hour, the great man strode onto the stage in front of a packed house. For a long moment he stood and regarded his audience. How many of you, he demanded, want to be writers?

A few tentative hands went up. Lewis continued to stare at the assembly. More hands were raised, until everyone in the large room had his hand in the air.

Then why aren’t you home writing? Lewis snarled, and stalked off the stage.

Having made his point, he subsequently stalked back on again and gave his lecture. After all, the man was getting paid for this, and he knew which side of the bread held the butter. All the same, Lewis’s query echoes on down through the years. If one is to be a writer, one is to sit home and write. Why wasn’t the audience home writing? For that matter, why wasn’t Lewis himself home writing?

I tell this story now not to lead you to set this book aside and proceed directly to your typewriter, but to turn the question upon myself. I’ve just told you how I spend my time during seminar season, which typically includes not only the spring months when we have seminars scheduled but the several months preceding them when the advance work gets done. During these months, while I may put in any number of twelve- and fifteen-hour days, I do virtually no writing aside from my monthly column for Writer’s Digest. If I am indeed a writer, and such has been my occupation for over a quarter of a century, then why on earth am I gadding about the country welcoming people to Write For Your Life? Why am I writing form letters and ad copy when I could be writing novels?

Why aren’t I home writing?

Let me assure you that this is by no means the first time the question has occurred to me. It comes up frequently, especially during the inevitable low points of seminar season, when the work involved seems to be too much, the rewards too few, and the time and energy commitments too great. Why am I doing this? Why did I start doing this in the first place?

To answer that, I’ll have to tell you something about the origins of Write For Your Life.

In May of 1983, Lynne and I took an intensive weekend seminar, one of those holistic transformational experiences designed to change your life. We took it, and it did what it was designed to do, transforming and enlarging our perceptions in any number of ways.

A month later, we took an introductory one-day version of the seminar as a refresher course, and a month after that, we took the weekend version a second time. And, somewhere in the course of June or July, it struck me that there